


What Goes Around Comes Around

by unintelligiblescreaming



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Book: Night Watch, Book: Thief of Time, Canon Compliant, Fun With Narrative Causality, Gen, The History Monks, The People's Republic of Treacle Mine Road, The People's Revolution of the Glorious Twenty-Fifth of May, Time Travel, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-25
Updated: 2017-05-25
Packaged: 2018-11-04 17:41:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10995774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unintelligiblescreaming/pseuds/unintelligiblescreaming
Summary: A fic for the Glorious 25th of May.--The first time Lu-Tze learned of the Glorious People’s Republic of Treacle Mine Road was long before Sam Vimes got caught in a thunderstorm and was swept thirty years into the past.In fact, when Lu-Tze was young and light on his feet and had only just moved to Ankh-Morpork for the first time, he took a wrong turn and stumbled upon a narrative temporal phenomenon the likes of which he had never seen in his life.





	What Goes Around Comes Around

**Author's Note:**

> written the day before the 25th, all at once and posted with only minor edits, so i apologize for typos and mildly substandard writing.

The first time Lu-Tze learned of the Glorious People’s Republic of Treacle Mine Road was long before Sam Vimes got caught in a thunderstorm and was swept thirty years into the past. In fact, when Lu-Tze was young and light on his feet and had only just moved to Ankh-Morpork for the first time, he took a wrong turn and stumbled upon a narrative temporal phenomenon the likes of which he had never seen in his life.

He was picking up some groceries for Mrs. Cosmopolite, who was graciously allowing him lodging, because was it not written that What Goes Around Comes Around? He was also lost.

He tried asking random passerby for directions, but his attempts were all rebuffed with variants on “up yours, mister” and the slurs that were generally leveled at anyone who looked too foreign for their own good. So instead of turning onto the Pitts as she should have, he missed the intersection and continued straight ahead.

It was the 25th of May. Spring was battling valiantly against the smog and grime of the city, and contrary to all expectation the few shrubs that had survived were putting out green shoots.

Lu-Tze hitched up the bag of groceries and thought the sacred wisdom: My Joints Aren’t What They Used To Be. He was a bit young for that one, he reflected, but was not all wisdom valuable?

He turned onto Treacle Mine Road.

It was noon. Bright and sunny. The street was loud and busy with carts and animals and people, as you’d expect on any weekday. And yet as he walked forward, the sun dimmed, the air cooled, the hustle of the streets became muffled, farther away.

The scent of lilacs filled in the air.

The hairs on his arms tingled as if a storm was approaching.

He took a good look around, really _looked_ rather than focusing on the unimportant surface bits, like the buildings and the people—and nearly choked on his own tongue.

This—this was—it was a disruption in the space-time continuum so extreme that it was a wonder anyone in the immediate vicinity was still alive. This was a rift so profound that rationally speaking, he should be standing in the equivalent of a smoking crater where a chunk of functional reality used to be.

There were no words to describe the wrongness of this place. You could say that the passage of time in this location was like a length of yarn which had been bundled into a ball and left unattended in a room full of eager-eyed kittens. (It would be blatantly incorrect, but you could definitely say that.)

“Ye gods,” said Lu-Tze, because some words always worked.

He ditched the groceries and started running.

He burst through the door of Mrs. Cosmopolite’s boarding house with a crash. The hostess jumped in surprise and nearly hit him over the head with the plate she was drying, but restrained herself, because that wasn’t Done. Instead she shouted, “Young man, just _what_ do you think you’re doing?”

“No time!”

If he’d stopped to think properly he would have realized how stupid a statement that was, but he was busy racing up the stairs and into his room. He grabbed his emergency supply pack from under the bed and dashed out again.

There were images in his head that didn’t make sense—darkness and rain and a silver cigar case, gleaming on the cobbles, and lilacs blooming in the night, over and over again.

When he returned to Treacle Mine Road he knelt down in the middle of the street, right in the middle of traffic. The carts moved smoothly around him without a blink despite their relocation occasionally involving a minor rewriting of the conventional laws of physics. He barely noticed. He found a bare patch of dirt and got to work.

He would be hard-pressed to construct a sophisticated detection mandala on such short notice, but he would damn well make do…

The air crackled with energy as he finished the last curve on the mandala. He dusted his hands and waited.

It began to turn.

The patterns shifted, then stilled.

He frowned. “No,” he said. “That can’t be right. Historical imperative? But this is so obviously a narrative disruption. An unfinished story.”

A rift in time that didn’t exist, memories of events that never happened… it had to be a result of an incomplete narrative unable to achieve a single resolution. Something, somewhen, had gone wrong, and a major role had gone unfulfilled, and now the phenomenon was scrabbling for a solution.

“Must be incorrectly set up,” he muttered to himself. “I mean, this thing is telling me there should be a major temporal incident any moment now—”

Unfortunately, the young Lu-Tze had not yet learned some valuable wisdom. For is it not written that You Are So Sharp You’ll Cut Yourself?

There was a sound like an elastic band snapping, and the world turned sideways.

He stumbled upright once the universe had returned to something close to normal and scrambled to get his bearings. He was still in the present day, but another time was—how to describe it, how to describe it— _layered_ on top, one moment falling over the other like snow. Fog and wind and darkness swirled in, obscuring the sky, wreathing around the figures in the courtyard before him.

The men were wearing Watch uniforms.

“Okay, lads,” said one of the men. He had an eyepatch and a battered breastplate, and a voice that echoed as if it was coming from very far away. _Years ago,_ thought Lu-Tze. “What we’re going to do is keep the peace. That’s our job…”

If Lu-Tze concentrated, he could still feel the rush of wind from the passing street and hear the sound of the busy city. But here, in a much more real sense, he could see the watchmen shuffling anxiously as they listened to the sergeant-at-arms. He talked about duty and right and wrong, and then he drew a line in the sand, and then the men made their choice.

History struck a chord.

The world shifted.

A barricade climbed into the air, higher and higher, packed with furniture and upturned carts and spare wood, held up by desperate hope and bottomless fear, the rawest emotions of humanity. When sufficiently concentrate, those were capable of twisting time into knots so complex that only a master of the temporal would ever be able to undo them.

And why would they want to? So what if someone thought it was odd that time crawled by while they were under stress, or if it went by instantly during a fun afternoon? That was what made people human. 

That sound again, and the world changed again—

A battle was raging around him. Men in battered uniforms, not many, fighting for their lives, wearing the lilac…

…the man with the eyepatch leapt forward, sword a blur in his hands, hacking wildly…

…and across the street, untouched by the carnage, was a little old man in a robe. He was sweeping peacefully at a patch of dust, undisturbed by the blood and guts and destruction whirling around him. It was surreal.

The old man looked up and winked.

Time stood still.

(Well, it didn’t _really_ stand still, but the true answer involved multivariable calculus and besides, it was a useful metaphor and at this moment in time Lu-Tze was not the type to spend valuable effort messing about with the sneaky kind of sums with letters in them.)

The old sweeper carefully plodded across the frozen tableau, ducking under an upraised sword and stepping around the body of a watchman who had not yet hit the ground.

Ah, so another monk was on the problem, then? The young time-traveler stood up straight and tried to act like this was an expected development.

“Hey, kid,” said the sweeper. “You look like you could use a cup of tea.”

 

* * *

 

Lu-Tze was convinced that this particular branch of the No Such Monastery did not exist in the present day, which made it quite worrying that it appeared to exist in both the past and the future.

He sipped his tea with yak butter and eyed the old sweeper suspiciously. He distrusted older authority figures on principle.

“So you spotted the incongruity, did you,” said the sweeper. “Historical imperative’s a tricky thing, isn’t it.”

“It’s not historical imperative. It’s narrative causality.”

The sweeper sighed. “You’ve got a lot to learn, kiddo. It’s _both._ The Glorious People’s Republic of Treacle Mine Road… it didn’t take long for the city to forget, but the story still leaves echoes. It wants to be remembered.”

The young man frowned. “I kept having memories of things that never happened. Deja vu without the original vu.”

“Sounds pretty standard. Lilacs, right? You smelled the lilacs? That’s the anchor. On the Glorious 25th of May, the lilacs are in bloom. They will always be in bloom, forever and ever, for as long as time exists, and whenever the survivors see it, they’ll be brought back here. Even poor sods like you with receptive enough minds will be saddled with this piece of history.”

“But this doesn’t mean anything to me. I don’t understand why a bunch of men would just get themselves killed like that just—just to be _heroes._ ” Lu-Tze knew a dramatic last stand when he saw one.

“Yeah, see, that’s ‘cos you’re seventeen and I’m old and wise,” said the sweeper. “Why do we fix time? Is it because we want to be heroic? Is it because we have to? No, we do it because we _could_ just let time curl in on itself and extinguish all the complicated bits like sentient life, but we _decide_ to make fixing this mess our job.”

“But—alright, fine, but there’s _still_ a gigantic rift in reality and I’m standing in it. What are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing.”

“ _What?”  
_

“You heard me. There’s no reason to muck about with a story that’s looking to be told. This case is unusual, mostly ‘cause it’s a bit under-construction if you know what I mean, but yea, is it not written that There’s A First Time For Everything?”

The young time-traveler sat bolt upright. “You—you’re a follower of the Way? But none of the senior monks—it’s just a thing that I made up so—I mean—”

The sweeper shook his head sadly. “Hoo boy. I really am paying for how much of an idiot back then. I suppose What Goes Around Comes Around.”

The young history monk’s eyes widened, realization dawning. He opened his mouth to speak, but the old man interrupted him. “Now, this is slightly more complicated than a standard closed time loop, since you’re not here in any physical sense. So if I just…”

He slashed his hand through the air. The air began to sing with mounting tension, time itself groaning under the weight, and the world snapped back to the present.

The city streets bustled around him. Lu-Tze’s mouth was slack with shock. Had that _really_ been…?

He looked down at the mandala he had scrawled in the dirt. The wind had scrubbed it out.

Overhead, the lilacs were in bloom.

**Author's Note:**

> posted originally at my main (discworld etc) tumblr, [sybil-ramkin.tumblr.com](http://sybil-ramkin.tumblr.com/post/161048845414/what-goes-around-comes-around-a-fic-for-the). come talk to me!


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